Library Technology Reports

Social Media Curation

Social media allows you to scale up a core librarian practice—connecting your community to information and learning--across geographic boundaries, 24/7. Addressing “curation” as the term is used colloquially, this issue of Library Technology Reports draws from 17 in-depth interviews to show how...

Digital Media Labs in Libraries

Families share stories with each other and veterans reconnect with their comrades, while teens edit music videos and then upload them to the web: all this and more can happen in the digital media lab (DML), a gathering of equipment with which people create digital content or convert content that is in analog formats. Enabling community members to create digital content was identified by The Edge...

3-D Printers for Libraries

As the maker movement continues to grow and 3-D printers become more affordable, an expanding group of hobbyists is keen to explore this new technology. In the time-honored tradition of introducing new technologies, many libraries are considering purchasing a 3-D printer. Jason Griffey, an early enthusiast of 3-D printing, has researched the marketplace and seen several systems first hand at the...

Big-Deal Serial Purchasing: Tracking the Damage

The “Big Deal” looked like a good deal, a true win-win. But while the Big Deal has lowered the rate of serial price inflation, for many libraries the pricing remains unsustainable. Nearly half of libraries have seen substantial increases in serial spending during the past ten years. Where does your institution fall on the scale? Drawing from National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data,...

Electronic Resource Management Systems: A Workflow Approach

To get to the bottom of a successful approach to Electronic Resource Management (ERM), Anderson interviewed staff at 11 institutions about their ERM implementations. Among her conclusions, presented in this issue of Library Technology Reports, is that grasping the intricacies of your workflow—analyzing each step to reveal the gaps and problems—at the beginning is crucial to selecting and...

Streaming Video Resources for Teaching, Learning, and Research

According to a 2012 Ithaka study, 80 percent of faculty in the humanities and 70 percent in social sciences use video, film, and non-textual resources for teaching undergraduates. Streaming video is not simply an accommodation to distance learners; rather, it’s an expectation for the curriculum, and a valuable tool for teaching critical thinking skills, analysis, and the use of primary sources...

Interfacing with library collections has changed drastically in the past several years, now integrating not only with the ILS but other local and external resources. Offering valuable guidance for effectively evaluating discovery systems, this issue of Library Technology Reports is filled with information on recent trends and the current state of the art in discovery. Breeding surveyed...

Streamlining Information Services Using Chatbots

The most common questions coming to your library by IM or Chat, such as inquiries about location, hours, policies, or patron access to specific material, can all be answered by a chatbot, saving valuable staff time. A chatbot effectively creates a natural language processing interface to your catalog and databases, providing answers to library users by structuring language to a database’s...

Technological Innovation: Perceptions and Definitions

Everyone agrees that innovation is a worthy aim, but what does innovation actually entail? And what does it mean for a library organization? For this issue of Library Technology Reports, Jason Vaughan reviewed professional literature, both scholarly and mainstream, and surveyed library directors to learn their views on how technological innovation is impacting today’s libraries. Identifying...

The Library Mobile Experience: Practices and User Expectations

How are libraries meeting the evolving needs of mobile users? According to comScore, the smartphone is in the “late majority stage of technology adoption curve.” And people don’t turn to their devices only for quick facts when on the move: 93 percent of mobile users access the Internet from home on their devices; what’s more, Pew reports that 63 percent of Americans age 16 and over would use...

Library Linked Data: Research and Adoption

Computers increasingly collect, manage, and analyze data for scholarly research. Linked data gives libraries the ability to support this e-research, making it a powerful tool. Libraries are at a tipping point in adoption of linked data, and this issue of Library Technology Reports explores current research in linked open data, explaining concepts and pioneering services, such as
Five building...